Meriwether Lewis’s Notorious Birthday Note

This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.—

What would you think about someone who wrote this in his diary? Would you think the person was depressed and gloomy—tormented by regret and full of self-doubt? Or would you think the writer was motivated and forward-looking, determined to improve himself and eager to explore future possibilities?

Meriwether Lewis wrote this passage in his journal on August 18, 1805, the evening of his thirty-first birthday. It is probably the most picked-over paragraph in the entire body of the Lewis and Clark journals. Of everything Lewis ever wrote, these words have done more than anything else to cement his image as a melancholy, troubled man, already headed down the path to suicide.

The Rocky Mountains at the Continental Divide

Historians differ in their interpretation of Lewis’s birthday note. It is nearly impossible not to view his words through the prism of his violent death four years later. It is striking that Lewis wrote these words while at the Continental Divide—a critical point in the Expedition, where he seemed to have come so far and accomplished so much. Yet Lewis had no way of knowing at that moment how the journey would turn out. He didn’t know that in a little over a year he would be returning home a hero. At that moment, he had the Rocky Mountains to cross.

His thoughts seemed to be running along the lines of “I haven’t done anything yet.” Given the task ahead—and the reality that there was no turning back—it would not be surprising if he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. Still, this is hardly evidence of excessive melancholy. Impatience with himself and the situation, perhaps—but hardly suicidal impulses.

By His Own Hand? The Strange Death of Meriwether Lewis, edited by John D.W. Guice (2006)

One of the most interesting commentaries on the birthday note I have read comes from historian John D. W. Guice in By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis. As a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, Guice used to hand out the birthday journal entry to his university students on the first day of class, with instructions to write a few sentences about the person who wrote it. “Of the several hundred paragraphs that I received over two years, not one student identified the birthday thoughts as evidence of depression or impending self-destruction,” Guice wrote. In some respects, he suggests, the self-reflective thoughts Lewis expresses are typical of someone who is approaching what they consider to be middle-age.

So what do you think? Was Lewis already losing it at the point in the expedition? Is the birthday note evidence of depression and impending mental disintegration? Or as the country song says, was he simply expressing the hope that, “I’ll do better in my next thirty years?”

Whatever you make of the note on its own, there is a raft of evidence that Lewis suffered from depression, including his silence through the second half of the expedition, his drinking after, and numerous statements from his contemporaries about his melancholy nature. Dave Nicandri has an interesting article about Lewis’s mental state.

Part of the difficulty that Lewis was having is that he was wrestling with his sexuality. There are many hints in the journals and elsewhere that Lewis was gay. I need to make a blog post about this sometime.

I agree that there is a lot of evidence that Lewis suffered from depression and in fact, that is a major component in our book To the Ends of the Earth. I do get a little weary of the practice of sifting everything he ever did or wrote through that filter.

It seems to me that on both sides of the “was he gay/straight” or “suicide/murder” debates, lurks the attitude that a gay person or a person with mental illness cannot have acted heroically or capably. I’d like to think that one of these days, we will leave these attitudes in the past.

I believe this note was a reflection of how precious he considered life and how he had frittered away so much of it (in his own estimations) on his self-indulgent desires and in his new found maturity, he realized that half his life has gone and he was resolving to be a better person the second half…get more accomplished and strive to make his efforts better mankind rather than himself.

Whether or not he committed suicide or was straight or gay will never be factually known, but from what I’ve ascertained in my readings, I would place odds on his being straight (preferring women to men sexually), while being a man’s man and a wanderer. Preferring to be constantly on the move to better himself, his knowledge, his thirst for discovering the unknown and probably a social awkwardness in relating to the opposite sex.

He might find his female counterpart more easily in today’s society as women are now not as restricted by societal norms and customs as they were then.

If he did commit suicide, he made, literally, a bloody mess of the thing by failing to do it up right. How painful for him! My take, and I haven’t seen it written in the books and info I have been perusing of late, is that his bipolar, depression, melancholy…whatever label you apply…wasn’t enough to send him over the edge. I think it was the mercury in the pills he took. He popped them pretty regularly for any and all ailments…the thunderbolts…and along with heavy drinking and other drug use, I think he must’ve ended up with schizophrenia and a madness and paranoia that had him hearing voices and he sought to silence those voices by shooting them (him).

I so wish someone would find those missing journal entries. He was making notes of other discoveries along the way, but for that many pages to be missing, he must’ve sent them ahead. Has all of Jefferson’s papers been gone through? I’m hoping there is still a discovery to be made.

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